Best E-commerce Website Builders In 2026 Ranked & Reviewed

Best for: Most online stores

Starting price: $29/month (annual billing) Trustpilot: 1.5/5 from 4,300+ reviews

If you're starting an online store and you're not sure where to begin, start with Shopify. It was built from day one to do one job: help you sell things online, and two decades in, nothing else does that job as completely. The checkout experience is the best in the category, the app ecosystem is enormous (6,000+ integrations), and the platform scales from a one person side hustle all the way up to enterprise brands doing real volume.

What sets Shopify apart isn't any single feature. It's how confident the whole experience feels. Inventory syncing, abandoned cart recovery, multi channel selling across Instagram, TikTok, and Amazon, a native POS system that ties your online and in person sales together. It's all there, and it all works.

What I love about it: The checkout is genuinely best in class and converts noticeably better than competitors in side by side testing. If you sell in person and online, Shopify POS syncing your inventory automatically across both is one of those features you don't appreciate until you've used a platform without it.

What bugs me: The real cost of Shopify is meaningfully higher than the sticker price. Once you add the apps most stores actually need, reviews, upsells, email marketing, advanced reporting, you're often looking at $50 to $150 a month on top of your subscription. And unless you're using Shopify Payments, you're paying transaction fees on every single sale.

On Trustpilot: That 1.5/5 from over 4,300 reviews looks alarming at first glance, and I want to give it honest context rather than wave it away. A meaningful chunk of those reviews come from confused end consumers blaming Shopify for a merchant's shipping issue, which isn't really a Shopify problem. But a real number of reviews are from merchants reporting frozen funds and slow support escalation during account holds, and that pattern is worth taking seriously. The gap between how good the product is and how rough the support experience can be during a crisis is real, and you should go in with eyes open.

Reddit says: r/shopify is one of the most active ecommerce communities online, and the consensus is consistent: best platform available, but budget for app costs beyond the subscription, and understand that support quality drops off fast once your issue gets complicated.

Best for: Anyone selling physical or digital products, dropshippers, print on demand sellers, and brands planning to scale seriously.

Best for: Scaling stores and B2B sellers

Starting price: $29/month (annual billing) Trustpilot: 1.3/5 from 448 reviews

BigCommerce doesn't get the mainstream attention Shopify does, but for certain kinds of stores it's genuinely the better tool. The standout feature is zero platform transaction fees, period, regardless of which payment gateway you use. For a store doing serious volume, that alone can save thousands of dollars a year compared to Shopify's surcharges.

BigCommerce also packs more native functionality into its base plans than most competitors, which means less reliance on paid apps for things like multi currency support and catalog syncing. It handles B2B selling, complex product variants, and large catalogs better than almost anything else in this list.

What I love about it: No transaction fees, ever, on any plan. Native B2B tools like customer group pricing and price lists are genuinely useful for wholesale operations. And the platform handles deep, hierarchical category structures natively in a way Shopify still struggles to match without apps.

What bugs me: The revenue cap model is a real friction point. Cross a sales threshold ($50K, then $180K, then $400K annually) and you get automatically bumped to a pricier plan, whether you wanted the upgrade or not. Design customization also requires learning BigCommerce's proprietary Stencil framework, and the free theme library is thinner and less modern than Shopify's.

On Trustpilot: A 1.3/5 from 448 reviews is rough, and unlike Shopify's review pool, BigCommerce's complaints skew heavily toward the billing and support experience specifically, not confused customers. The recurring theme is the automatic plan upgrade triggered by sales growth catching merchants off guard, paired with what reviewers describe as a difficult billing department to work with when disputing charges. It's a smaller sample size than Shopify's, but the consistency of the complaints is worth noting.

Reddit says: Comes up most often as the answer when merchants are hitting Shopify's transaction fee ceiling at scale. Reddit users consistently praise the feature depth, but flag the Stencil learning curve as a genuine hurdle for design work.

Best for: Medium to large ecommerce businesses, B2B sellers, and high volume stores where transaction fees meaningfully affect the bottom line.

Best for: Beginners with smaller product catalogs

Starting price: $29/month for ecommerce plans (annual billing) Trustpilot: 3.4/5 from 27,500+ reviews

Wix occupies an interesting spot in this list. It's not a dedicated ecommerce platform the way Shopify and BigCommerce are, but it's a genuinely strong general purpose website builder with ecommerce capabilities bolted on, and for a certain kind of seller, that combination works better than a pure ecommerce tool would.

If you're selling a smaller catalog and you also want a real website around it, blog, portfolio, booking system, service pages, Wix lets you build all of that in one place with the most intuitive editor in the category. The unstructured drag and drop design gives you more creative freedom than almost anything else on this list.

What I love about it: The ease of use is unmatched for beginners. You can have a functional store live in an afternoon, no technical knowledge required. And because Wix isn't purely an ecommerce platform, it's the better choice for sellers who need their site to do more than just sell, think a coaching business with both products and bookings, or an artist selling prints alongside a portfolio.

What bugs me: Inventory management is genuinely limited compared to Shopify, no low stock alerts or advanced tax tools on the basic tiers. The unstructured editor that makes design so flexible can also make repetitive tasks tedious. Want every product grid to share a background color? You're editing each one individually. And you can't transfer your content if you switch templates later.

On Trustpilot: 3.4/5 from over 27,500 reviews is comfortably the strongest score among the ecommerce focused entries on this list, and the volume gives it real weight. Dig into the negative reviews and the complaints lean heavily toward billing surprises and slow support response times rather than dissatisfaction with the actual store building experience.

Reddit says: r/web_design and r/Entrepreneur regularly recommend Wix for non developer small business owners running simpler stores. The honest caveat that comes up often: once your catalog or operations get complex, people report outgrowing it and migrating to Shopify.

Best for: Small catalogs, sellers who want a full website alongside their store, beginners who want the most approachable editor available.

Best for: Creatives selling alongside a portfolio

Starting price: $36/month for commerce plans (annual billing) Trustpilot: 3.0/5 from 3,400+ reviews

Squarespace earns its spot here for a specific kind of seller: photographers, artists, and designers who need to sell products but care just as much, maybe more, about how their site looks while doing it. The templates remain the best looking in the website builder space, and that design sensibility carries over cleanly into the storefront experience.

It's worth being clear eyed about where Squarespace sits relative to Shopify and BigCommerce here. This is a general purpose website builder with solid ecommerce functionality layered in, not a dedicated selling platform. For a small catalog of handmade goods, art prints, or digital downloads, it's more than capable. For a large, complex inventory, you'll feel the ceiling.

What I love about it: The design first approach means your store looks polished without any real design skill required. Built in tools for selling subscriptions and digital content are a nice touch that not every builder on this list offers natively, and the checkout experience is clean and trustworthy looking, which matters more for conversion than people often realize.

What bugs me: The app marketplace is small, only around three dozen integrations, so if Squarespace doesn't natively support something you need, you may be stuck. Localization is also limited; the platform only displays one currency at a time, which rules it out for serious international selling. And starting in 2026, Squarespace introduced a per transaction fee for automated tax calculations on top of existing plan costs.

On Trustpilot: A 3.0/5 from roughly 3,400 reviews puts it in the middle of the pack here. The complaints skew heavily toward customer support, specifically slow, email only response times when something goes wrong with billing or a payment hold. The product experience itself tends to get better marks elsewhere; it's the support layer that drags the number down.

Reddit says: The default recommendation across creative subreddits for anyone whose site needs to look good first and sell second. People who leave for another platform almost always cite the small app ecosystem or limited international support as the reason, not the design.

Best for: Photographers, artists, designers, and small catalog creative businesses where visual presentation matters as much as the sale itself.

Best for: Developers who want total control

Starting price: Free plugin; hosting and extensions typically run $20 to $50+ per month

WooCommerce is a different kind of animal than everything else on this list. It's not a hosted platform, it's a free, open source plugin that turns a WordPress site into a fully functional online store. That distinction matters a lot. You're not paying a monthly platform fee in the traditional sense, but you are responsible for your own hosting, security, and a meaningfully steeper technical setup than any other entry here.

For the right person, that tradeoff is worth it. WooCommerce offers a level of customization and control that hosted platforms simply can't match, since you have full access to the underlying code. It's also one of the most widely used ecommerce tools on the internet, which means an enormous ecosystem of extensions, themes, and developer support.

What I love about it: The control is genuinely unmatched. If you can imagine a specific store behavior, there's almost certainly a way to build it, either through an existing extension or custom development. There's also no platform mandated transaction fee structure to work around, since you own the infrastructure.

On Trustpilot: A 2.0/5 from a relatively small pool of around 134 reviews. Because WooCommerce isn't a single hosted company in the way Shopify or Wix are, its Trustpilot presence is thinner and less representative than the others on this list; many users review their hosting provider separately from the plugin itself. Take the number as a loose data point rather than a definitive read on the experience.

What bugs me: This is not a beginner friendly option, full stop. You're managing WordPress hosting, plugin updates, security patches, and potential plugin conflicts, all of which can break your store if mishandled. Costs are also less predictable than a flat monthly plan; between hosting, a quality theme, and the extensions most stores end up needing, the real cost adds up quickly and requires more research upfront than picking a Shopify plan.

Reddit says: r/woocommerce and the broader WordPress community are full of developers and technically comfortable small business owners who swear by the control it offers. The consistent advice for beginners: don't start here unless you're comfortable with WordPress already, or you're working with someone who is.

Best for: Developers, agencies, and technically confident store owners who already use WordPress and want full control over their ecommerce setup.